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User blog:Rayolinels/New Gallery namespace
This is a little technical, but there is now a Gallery namespace on the wiki. What does this mean? Well, first lets get into what a namespace means on Fandom/Wikia/MediaWiki. A namespace is essentially a big section of the wiki, and every page is in only one namespace depending on its purpose. For example, there are the Main namespace pages (no prefix), for the reader-facing articles; Talk pages, to discuss particular articles and how to improve them; Template pages, to hold small bits of data or formatting rules so they can be easily used on many pages, and so on and so forth. Template pages are very useful: For example, they hold the formatting for the Template:Zelda Games Played tables, the Template:Zelda Game Rankings (Top 5 Zelda Games) displays, the Template:Quote boxes and even small things like the Template:Console icons in user infoboxes and the Template:User Infoboxs themselves. But since they are not articles, they do not normally show up when you search pages or use the "Random Page" button. The new Gallery namespace is for little snippets that are transcluded onto multiple pages; these snippets wouldn't make much sense to show up when using the "Random Page" button, like with templates above. On a wiki, having a page automatically displayed on another is known as transclusion (like inclusion or exclusion but with trans-'', across, to signify content that is displayed across more than one page but only editable on one "master" page). This functionality is useful for keeping everything up-to-date instead of having duplicate information across multiple pages. For example, take the Zelda-themed drawings made by the ZNG on Miiverse. There is a gallery of these drawings on the page of each artist, but if you wanted to see all of them, regularly you would need to navigate to each page individually. With transclusion, there is a "master" page for ''just the Miiverse Zelda drawings by one person (Mine, or Nintendoer's, or Christian's, etc.). To allow these galleries to be more contextually relevant, their pages are transcluded onto each ZNG member's page and onto the Gallery of Miiverse Drawings, which has everyone's drawings next to each other on a single page for convenient viewing. Transclusion from the Gallery namespace is also used for other elements of each ZNG member's page, such as each ZNG member's top 5 Zelda games and their tables of Zelda games completion. To sum it up, the reason these galleries of Miiverse drawings and other snippets of information about each ZNG page are now in the Gallery namespace is so that A) they are better grouped together as being snippets and not full pages and B) they do not show up in when the "Random page" button is used. That all for today, I hope you learned something new about how the wiki works! P.S. What can you do with this new information? Well, if you ever want to create a new page collecting some interesting detail about all ZNG members that is on their individual pages and also is on a central page, now you know to put it in the Gallery namespace. Also, if you go to edit the any of these Gallery pages (please do if you see any that are incorrect or incomplete!), now you know why they have "Gallery:" in front of them and why they are separate from each ZNG member's page. Category:Blog posts